When I Slip

It's funny the way music works, how a simple melody or someone's voice can catapult us into an emotional extreme. And maybe the lyrics don't quite match up with how you're feeling, but somehow they still do. Today I was having brunch with a new friend and this song came on: Miike Snow – Animal  and it's not new and I've heard it before, but then the chorus hits and I hear

I change shapes just to hide in this place
But I'm still, I'm still an animal
Nobody knows it but me when I slip
Yeah I slip, I'm still an animal

and it's got me thinking about slipping. And what happens when we slip back towards darkness and low points and things that are scarier than they should be. These past few weeks have been hard for me, and I've been worried that I'm coming out of some sort of shock I didn't know I was experiencing (not that I think I'm fine, but just that I've been moving along in some capacity). I'm feeling a little at a loss for words tonight, but my heart is aching hard and I feel like writing something, anything at all, might ease my pain. So that's a disclaimer against what may end up as a stream of consciousness.

K's Law School is throwing a fundraiser for him this week. He used to wear brightly colored socks--amongst other sartorial choices that I always liked--and so they're asking everyone to wear bright socks on Tuesday to raise funds for a scholarship. So maybe if you think of it, and you own some bright socks, wear them on Tuesday and think of K, even if you didn't know him. 

So let's talk about that. Knowing K. Because many people thought they did, and they didn't. He was intensely private, although kind and attentive and a good listener. He was guarded about himself and his goals and his life. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person in the world who really knew him at this stage in his life, because he told me things he didn't tell anyone else. The way you get so comfortable with someone you don't sugar coat, you can just be candid and honest and open and know they get it. Even when I didn't get it, I got it because I got him and how he saw the world. I was lucky to have known him like that, to be trusted so much by someone who didn't trust very easily at all. 

I'm feeling lost. None of this is helping my heartache tonight, but I still want to write it. Sometimes I just want to talk about K for hours and move in and out of crying and memories. I want to show whoever is listening pictures and tell them stories. I want to play the single voicemail I have so they can hear his voice and try to create an image of the whole person I knew.  And I don't want them to say anything. I don't want to be told it will be okay eventually, or to see a therapist, or to be gentle with myself, or to let myself feel the anger and sadness. I appreciate it, the kindness and the good intent, but I don't want to hear it anymore. I just want to be able to talk forever about someone who doesn't exist anymore. And how fucked up it is that it's so easy to stop existing (yes he's still with me, etc etc didn't we just talk about not saying those things anymore?) and how unfair.

My heart is too heavy to write the way I want, or say the things I want to say. So I'm just going to stop. Sometimes I wish time and world and everything would just stop. Sometimes I wish I didn't bounce between extremes and confusion and feelings of nothings and everythings. I wish I wasn't vulnerable and that I didn't trust so easily. I wish I was more like K, who was good at so very many things that I am not good at...and I am good at things he wasn't good at---that's why we worked so well. 

I just really, really miss him right now. I want the person who completed me to be here to hold me. He is the only person who I want to tell me it will be alright. He is the only person I want to make me laugh, or to keep me company so I don't feel lonely. He is the only person who could truly keep me from feeling lost. Good night friends, in all this confusion and odd ramblings of tonight. The next one will be more coherent. The next one will have a point. I think I said inspirational on Facebook? The next one will be...something. Hopefully inspired. Hopefully better.

This is Anger

I am unpredictable. Not my emotions, but me. I have no baseline for any response, and offense happens easy. Too easy and it makes me uncomfortable, my own pendulum of happysadangryemptynumb, my own foreignness. I feel xenophobic about myself. Is that even possible? Maybe in some irony. As much so as the fact that there is comfort and familiarity in the way I start hyperventilating rage and yet there remains a grave concern in myself for my inability to tamp down that same anger. This whole bit, this is anger. It's going to be as rough to read as it is to admit, and I wouldn't blame you for stopping now. Just don't judge me too harsh tonight, friends.

Here is something that makes me very angry as of late: anyone trying to identify with my situation. I'm an asshole tonight. Empathy and sympathy such close bedfellows, but the mere suggestion shoots off exploding shiny spots of anger in my brain. The parent of someone they cared about, a friend of a friend, someone they were tangentially close to. Fuck outta here. The anger is so loud then, because how dare they? What gives them the right? I'm an asshole for that too. Everyone is different, and death touches us all. And we react differently. I know this. There is rationality and caring in there too, but I just feel so raw. And so few people have lost their partner the way I have, with the jolting suddenness. With the lack of expectation or preparation. And to be frank, with youth. So don't suggest you get it. You don't. This is Anger talking now. Forgive me. Forgive how I am all metallic and right angles, glass frozen in ice, shards of quick to furry and unforgiving of your trespass. Forgive me when I cannot forgive you. It is unfair to ask, but nothing about any of this is fair.

All this anger rolls over me, rolls me over; themes of oceans and tides maybe, or a strong wind. Color it with something violent underneath, make it ugly. Make it hurt. Let's hurt something beautiful today. Utterly obliterate the innocent. I want scalding water dripped slowly on skin, I want stoning. Give me buried alive, something slow and murderous. Let's get horrific. Let's make it abominable. Oh but Sara, this isn't you. This isn't who we know. I'm sorry, but welcome to me, in After. Welcome to I don't know myself anymore, welcome to when will the space behind my eyes stop being empty. Welcome to when will I be present, when will I care? Welcome to how anger simmers just below my surface, and you'll never know because control. Because smiles. Because easy going. Because I can't let it consume me. Because anger is not me, not forever. Because something more sinister: I am a very good liar now.

I don't want to post this. I don't want you to know this truth, whoever you are right now, reading this. I hate the anger. I hate how easy it is to go to that place, that royal injustice so deep it is a splinter ten miles long through every inch of my body. I'm toying with deleting this. But I got so angry writing it, I have to believe it wants release. I've said I was ugly before, and here is the ugliest. Here is the most pathetic, the most embarrassing. And maybe the most honest, all laid out and spread before you. Judge me. Or don't. Sympathize. Or don't. Know it's not desire that is this anger, but consumption. It is disgusting, but delicious. It is satisfying, because it is feeling. It's the heady smokiness, crowded like a room, where otherwise there is absence. Where otherwise it is empty. And who wouldn't take the fulfillment of fullness over standing in the biggest, emptiest canyon and echoing against yourself forever, mired in solitude. Alone.

So I just breathed out friends. This whole time, holding my breath, writing this. All clenched up and mean. And scared. Because anger is fear. And I have told you and will tell you more, it is terrifying to be this empty. It is terrifying to be new and exposed. And I have no idea who I am. I have no idea who I will become. A friend said this was exciting, this development. This reinvention, this new persona that can be crafted as intentionally or as lazily as I might prefer. Maybe that's true, but I'm not there yet. I still feel like I can't touch bottom, so how can I learn to swim? I can't, just yet. Or won't. I don't know. I do know shock is wearing off and wearing me down. Days have been darker, my personal fog denser and more impenetrable. I imagine if you feel energy and color in the world the way I do (yes I am odd in more ways than just Grieving), I must be some indescribable mix of dirty hues and shades of shadows and tones that exist in nightmares. I said let's get horrific, didn't I?

At work, someone decided my project managers needed to be made aware of "what was going on with me." What is going on with me, actually? Let's have that conversation, please. Let's have the conversation that you have so little idea of what is going on with me, you couldn't define it if it was happening to you. I am an asshole tonight. You all reading this sputter, but maybe they were concerned, possibly caring, possibly trying to help. Possibly some bullshit I won't buy. Tell me when you are eggshells and krazy glue and misery, and you still show up. Tell me when you are still there when by all rights, you should be anywhere else. Fuck it all. Tonight is so angry, friends. Days are angry too, but good sunlight and better company tempers that. I just can't stand that kind of judgement, that kind of false help. It's already hard, it already takes so much trying.

I hope you understand that sometimes it's best just to get it out. It's some kind of tapeworm, this anger, breaking up into little pieces and retreating back parasitic from prying and digging, from the impending excavation. I cannot wait for Somehow. I cannot wait to be myself again, whoever that person becomes. The road is long and uncertain, but I walk, and walk. I love to walk these days.

So much anger put out here, but mixed in to the way I love you for the support, the comments, the reaching out to connect. I am still the Sara you know, I promise (as much to myself as to you).